Most PHP applications should run inside a serverless application without any problems, and by using Bref, we get access to the most common extensions. If you need something special, you can compile your own additional layers for AWS to access. by Chris Tankersley

It is amazing how fast technology changes, especially around programming. In the span of one human lifetime, we have gone from needing rooms of equipment to run basic mathematical computations to being able to click a button and not even knowing where our code is being run. Currently, as I write this article, I completed […]

As is tradition since the pandemic, the world has yet again changed. This time it is the explosion of AI or Artificial Intelligence. Programmers have been chasing AI since 1959 but the advances that the OpenAI project has released to the general public have taken the world by storm. Programmers like you and I are […]

Last month we started looking at 12 Factor Applications, a set of rules for building robust, maintainable distributed applications. Developed by Heroku Engineer Adam Wiggins in 2011, it raised some important questions for distributed applications. by Chris Tankersley

As developers, we love being able to find patterns in the things we do. We can turn these patterns into rules we invariably learn, use, and eventually modify to work for us. A few times I have talked about design patterns, which describe how different patterns in code look and should be structured. Today, let’s […]

Despite what you may think, adding new people to a team does not speed up a project but can slow it down. We’ll take a look at how microservices can speed up development through the use of smaller teams, as well how to structure microservices by Chris Tankersley

Which should you use…Monolith or Microservices? Neither is better or worse, so let’s look at them more closely to figure out which will work for you. by Chris Tankersley

Ever since I started working on the Education Station column, one of my goals has been to ensure that the column’s content revolves around the things I think all developers should know. This means that useful coding topics like design patterns and dependency injection can sit alongside useful theory articles like how HTTP works or […]

One of the biggest laments of PHP is that it does not have a dedicated web server and instead relies on an external program like Apache or NGINX to handle the incoming request. Modern versions of PHP do ship with a development server, but that server is not recommended for production use at all. This […]

Why does PHP not work like a lot of other “modern” web languages, and what happens if we want it to work without a web server? Sure, we have the PHP development server, but it has always been labeled as for development only. Why is PHP the way it is, and can we make PHP […]